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  Anguished English

  An Anthology of Accidental Assaults on the English Language

  Richard Lederer

  Illustrations by Bill Thompson

  Anguished English

  Digital Edition v1.0

  Text © 2006 Richard Lederer

  Illustrations © 2006 Bill Thompson

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any means whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except brief portions quoted for purpose of review.

  Gibbs Smith, Publisher

  PO Box 667

  Layton, UT 84041

  Orders: 1.800.835.4993

  www.gibbs-smith.com

  ISBN: 978-1-4236-0889-9

  Anguished English

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  Schoolishness

  It’s a Blunderful World

  Stop the Presses!

  Inspired Gibberish

  Grammar Gaffes

  Note

  Introduction

  Mark Twain once wrote, “Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.” He could have added, “The human being is the only animal that truly laughs. Or needs to.”

  We all need to laugh. Recent studies have proved that he or she who laughs lasts. Each year the evidence grows that ingesting humor does a body good. Norman Cousins, who used laughter to conquer a debilitating disease, writes in Anatomy of an Illness, “It has always seemed to me that hearty laughter is a way to jog internally without having to go outdoors.”

  “A good laugh and a long sleep are the two best cures,” winks an Irish proverb. A belly-shaking guffaw stimulates the circulation, fills the lungs, colors the cheeks, energizes the respiratory system, relaxes muscle tension, adds endorphins and T-cells to the immune system, aerates the capillaries, stabilizes blood sugar levels, dulls pain and inflammation, provides superb aerobic exercise, tickles the funny bone—well, you get the idea.

  In Make ’Em Laugh, Dr. William Fry explains, “When laughter gets to the point where it is called ‘convulsive,’ almost every muscle in the body is involved.” May Anguished English split your sides, rock your ribs, detonate your stomach into a rolling boil, and convulse every muscle you own.

  Granting all the healthful effects of hearty laughter, I feel compelled to issue a warning: Overdosing on Anguished English could be hazardous to your daily routine. I caringly and carefully suggest that you sip the book slowly, imbibing no more than a chapter or two at a single sitting.

  A word about the authenticity of the bloopers you are about to read: To my knowledge, all the fluffs and flubs, goofs and gaffes, blunders, botches, boo-boos, and bloopers in this book are certified, genuine, and unretouched. None has been concocted by any professional humorist.

  In Anguished English, I lay before you the ripest fruits of a lifetime of being a hunter-gatherer of word botching. If you are a super duper blooper snooper, please send your best specimens to me at [email protected].

  Richard Lederer

  San Diego, California

  www.verbivore.com

  Schoolishness

  Student Bloopers Win Pullet Surprises

  One of the fringe benefits of being an English or history teacher is receiving the occasional jewel of a student blooper in an essay or test paper. The original classroom blunder probably dates back to the day that some unsuspecting pupil first touched quill to parchment. Ever since, students have demonstrated a remarkable facility for mixing up words that possess similar sounds but entirely different meanings or for goofing up the simplest of facts.

  The results range from the pathetic to the hilarious to the unintentionally insightful. The title of this chapter, for example, is based on a famous classroom faux pas: “In 1957, Eugene O’Neill won a Pullet Surprise.” Other students have given bizarre twists to history by asserting that Wyatt Burp and Wild Bill Hiccup were two great western marshals and that the inhabitants of Moscow are called Mosquitoes.

  Wyatt Burp and Wild Bill Hiccup

  Sometimes the humor issues from a confusion between two words. Working independently, students have written, “Having one wife is called monotony,” “When a man has more than one wife, he is a pigamist,” “A man who marries twice commits bigotry,” and “Acrimony is what a man gives his divorced wife.” While one student reminisced, “Each Thanksgiving it is a tradition for my family to shoot peasants,” another observed, “In nineteenth century Russia, the pheasants led horrible lives.” And, reversing a g and q, a young man once wrote, “When a boy and a girl are deeply in love, there is no quilt felt between them.”

  Side-splitting slips like these are collected by teachers throughout the world, who don’t mind sharing a little humor while taking their jobs seriously. Many an inmate in the house of correction (of composition) knows the one attributed to William Lyon Phelps of Yale University, who allegedly found this sentence gleaming out of a student essay: “The girl tumbled down the stairs and lay prostitute at the bottom.”

  In the margin of the paper, the professor commented: “My dear sir, you must learn to distinguish between a fallen woman and one who has merely slipped.”

  From my own cullings and those of other pedagogues, I offer my favorite student howlers, each a certifiably pure and priceless gem of fractured English worthy of a Pullet Surprise:

  A virgin forest is a place where the hand of man has never set foot.

  Although the patient had never been fatally ill before, he woke up dead.

  I expected to enjoy the film, but that was before I saw it.

  Arabs wear turbines on their heads.

  When there are no fresh vegetables, you can always get canned.

  It is bad manners to break your bread and roll in your soup.

  The problem with intersexual swimming is that the boys often outstrip the girls.

  Running is a unique experience, and I thank God for exposing me to the track team.

  A triangle which has an angle of 135 degrees is called an obscene triangle.

  The dog ran across the lawn, emitting whelps all the way.

  A virtuoso is a musician with real high morals.

  We had a longer holiday than usual this year because the school was closed for altercations.

  Bloopers abound in all types of classrooms. Take these (please!) from English papers:

  The bowels are a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes w and y.

  A passive verb is when the subject is the sufferer, as in “I am loved.”

  In Great Expectations, Miss Havisham puts herself into conclusion.

  The first scene I would like to analyze occurs in Heart of Darkness.

  At the start of The Grapes of Wrath, Oklahoma has been hit by a dust bowl.

  At the end of The Awakening, Edna thinks only of herself. Her suicide is selfish because she leaves all who care about her behind.

  In The Glass Menagerie, Laura’s leg keeps coming between her and other people.

  The death of Francis Macomber was a turning point in his life.

  Students often revise history beyond recognition:

  The Gorgons had long snakes in their hair. They looked like women, only more horrible.

  Zwingli’s followers all smashed their organs.

  Zanzibar is noted for its monkeys. The British governor lives there.

  The Puritans thought every event significant because it was a massage from God.

  The divine wind protected Japan by sinking the fleet of invading Mongrels.

  During the years 1933–38, there were domestic problems at home as well as abroad.

  The President of the United States, in having foreign affairs, has to have the consent of the Senate.

  The difference between a king and a p
resident is that a king is the son of his father, but a president isn’t.

  And even the science and health classrooms are not immune from verbal schoolishness:

  To collect sulphur, hold a deacon over a flame in a test tube.

  H2O is hot water, and CO2 is cold water.

  Three kinds of blood vessels are arteries, vanes, and caterpillars.

  A fossil is an extinct animal. The older it is, the more extinct it is.

  The human is more intelligent than the beast because the human brain has more convulsions.

  Artificial insemination is when the farmer does it to the cow and not the bull.

  To be a good nurse, you must be absolutely sterile.

  When you breathe, you inspire. When you do not breathe, you expire.

  Many women believe that an alcoholic binge will have no ill effects on the unborn fetus, but that is a large misconception.

  Finally, I give you some special tour de farces in which students offer penetrating glimpses into the obvious—and the not-so-obvious:

  Rural life is lived mostly in the country.

  Heredity means that if your grandfather didn’t have any children, then your father probably wouldn’t have any, and neither would you, probably.

  Last year many lives were caused by accidents.

  Abstinence is a good thing if practiced in moderation.

  The amount of education you have determines your loot in life.

  Necessity is the mother of convention.

  All teachers who receive such bloopers tell themselves that the laughter is not at the students but at what they have written. After all, as one young scholar has written, “Adolescence is the stage between puberty and adultery.”

  The World According to Student Bloopers

  It is truly astounding what havoc students can wreak upon the chronicles of the human race. I have pasted together the following “history” of the world from genuine, certified, authentic student bloopers collected from teachers throughout the world, from eighth grade through college level.

  Read carefully, and you will learn a lot.

  The inhabitants of ancient Egypt were called mummies, and they all wrote in hydraulics. They lived in the Sarah Dessert, which they cultivated by irritation and over which they traveled by Camelot. The climate of the Sarah is such that the inhabitants have to live elsewhere, so certain areas of the dessert are cultivated by irrigation. Ancient Egyptian women wore a calasiris, a loose-fitting garment which started just below the breasts which hung to the floor.

  The Bible is full of interesting caricatures. In the first book of the Bible, Guinness, Adam and Eve were created from an apple tree. One of their children, Cain, once asked, “Am I my brother’s son?” Noah’s wife was called Joan of Ark. Lot’s wife was a pillar of salt by day and a ball of fire by night.

  God asked Abraham to sacrifice Isaac on Mount Montezuma. Jacob, son of Isaac, stole his brother’s birthmark. Jacob was a patriarch, who brought up his twelve sons to be patriarchs, but they did not take to it. One of Jacob’s sons, Joseph, gave refuse to the Israelites.

  Pharaoh forced the Hebrew slaves to make bread without straw. Moses led them to the Red Sea, where they made unleavened bread, which is bread without any ingredients. Afterward, Moses went up on Mount Cyanide to get the Ten Commandments, but he died before he ever got to Canada. David was a Hebrew king skilled at playing the liar. He fought with the Philatelists, a race of people who lived in Biblical times. Solomon, one of David’s sons, had 300 wives and 700 porcupines.

  The Greeks were a highly sculptured people, and without them we wouldn’t have history. The Greeks invented three kinds of columns— Corinthian, Ironic, and Dork. They also created myths. A myth is a female moth. One myth says that the mother of Achilles dipped him in the river Stynx until he became intolerable. Achilles appears in the Iliad, by Homer. Homer also wrote the Oddity, in which Penelope was the last hardship that Ulysses endured on his journey. Socrates was a famous Greek teacher who went around giving people advice. They killed him. Socrates died from an overdose of wedlock.

  In the Olympic Games, Greeks ran races, jumped, hurled the biscuits, and threw the Java. The reward to the victor was a coral wreath. The government of Athens was democratic because people took the law into their own hands.

  Eventually, the Romans came along and conquered the Geeks. History calls people Romans because they never stayed in one place for very long. At Roman banquets, the guests wore garlics in their hair. Julius Caesar extinguished himself on the battlefields of Gaul. The Ides of March murdered him because they thought he was going to be made king. Caesar expired with these immortal words upon his dying lips: “Eat you, Brutus!” Nero was a cruel tyranny who would torture his poor subjects by playing the fiddle to them.

  The Romans were overrun by the ball bearings. Then came the Middle Ages, when everyone was middle aged. King Alfred conquered the Dames. King Arthur lived in the age of shivery, with brave knights on prancing horses and beautiful women. King Harold mustarded his troops before the Battle of Hastings. Joan of Arc was burnt to a steak and cannonized by Bernard Shaw. People contracted the blue bonnet plague, which caused them to grow boobs on their necks. Magna Carta provided that no free man should be hanged twice for the same offence. People performed morality plays about ghosts, goblins, virgins, and other mythical creatures.

  In midevil times most of the people were alliterate. The greatest writer of the time was Chaucer, who wrote many poems and verses and also wrote literature. Another tale tells of William Tell, who shot an arrow through an apple while standing on his son’s head.

  The Renaissance was an age in which more individuals felt the value of their human being. Martin Luther was nailed to the church door at Wittenberg for selling papal indulgences. He died a horrible death, being excommunicated by a bull.

  It was the sculptor Donatello’s interest in the female nude that made him the father of the Renaissance. It was an age of great inventions and discoveries. Gutenberg invented the Bible and removable type. Sir Walter Raleigh discovered cigarettes and started smoking. And Sir Francis Drake circumcised the world with a 100-foot clipper.

  Sir Francis Drake circumcised the world with a 100-foot clipper.

  The government of England was a limited mockery. Henry VIII found walking difficult because he had an abbess on his knee. Queen Elizabeth was the Virgin Queen. As a queen she was a success. When Elizabeth exposed herself before her troops, they all shouted, “Hurrah!” Then her navy went out and defeated the Spanish armadillo.

  The greatest writer of the Renaissance was William Shakespeare. Shakespeare never made much money and is famous only because of his plays. He lived at Windsor with his merry wives, writing tragedies, comedies, and errors. In one of Shakespeare’s famous plays, Hamlet rations out his situation by relieving himself in a long soliloquy. In another, Lady Macbeth tries to convince Macbeth to kill the king by attacking his manhood. Romeo and Juliet are an example of a heroic couplet.

  Writing at the same time as Shakespeare was Miguel Cervantes. He wrote Donkey Hoté. The next great author was John Milton. Milton wrote Paradise Lost. Then his wife died and he wrote Paradise Regained.

  During the Renaissance America began. Christopher Columbus was a great navigator who discovered America while cursing about the Atlantic. His ships were called the Nina, the Pintacolada, and the Santa Fe. Later the Pilgrims crossed the Ocean, and this is known as the Pill’s Grim Progress. When they landed at Plymouth Rock, they were greeted by the Indians, who came down the hill rolling their war hoops before them. Many of the Indian heroes were killed along with their cabooses, which proved very fatal to them. The winter of 1620 was a hard one for the settlers. Many people died and many babies were born. Captain John Smith was responsible for all this.

  One of the causes of the Revolutionary War was the English put tacks on their tea. Also, the colonists would send their parcels through the post without stamps. Finally, the colonists won the war and no longer had to pay for
taxis.

  The United States was founded by four fathers. Delegates from the original thirteen states formed the Contented Congress. Thomas Jefferson, a Virgin, and Benjamin Franklin were two singers of the Declaration of Independence. Franklin had gone to Boston carrying all his clothes in his pocket and a loaf of bread under each arm. He invented electricity by rubbing cats backwards and declared, “A horse divided against itself cannot stand.” Franklin died in 1790 and is still dead.

  Franklin invented electricity by rubbing two cats backwards.

  George Washington married Martha Curtis and in due time became the Father of Our Country. Then the Constitution of the United States was adopted to secure domestic hostility. Under the Constitution the people enjoyed the right to keep bare arms.

  Abraham Lincoln became America’s greatest precedent. Lincoln’s mother died in infancy, and he was born in a log cabin which he built with his very own hands. When Lincoln was president, he wore only a tall silk hat. He said, “In onion there is strength.” Abraham Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg Address while traveling from Washington to Gettysburg on the back of an envelope.